Kevin Harvick makes statement with Bristol win

From winning three of NASCAR’s biggest events in prevailing fashion, to having the reigning Sprint Cup champion in its ranks, to exhibiting weekly superiority in the form of victories and laps led, the dominance of the Toyota-backed alliance of Joe Gibbs Racing and Furniture Row Racing has been omnipresent throughout the 2016 season.

Such preeminence tends to cast a long shadow. One that’s even hard for a perennial championship contender to escape.

Yet while the Toyota juggernaut just steams along this season, Kevin Harvick has quietly gone about doing what he’s done throughout his three-year tenure with Stewart-Haas Racing: running consistently up front, challenging for wins and regularly knocking out top-five finishes.

And though Kyle Busch, Carl Edwards, Denny Hamlin, Matt Kenseth and Martin Truex Jr. present a unified front looking seemingly well-positioned to decide the championship amongst themselves, Harvick served a reminder on Sunday that he is ever capable of taking it to the Toyotas.

Harvick led the final 71 laps, and 128 overall (second only to Busch’s 256 laps) to win the Bass Pro Shops NRA Night Race at Bristol Motor Speedway. It was Harvick’s second win of the year, and first since March.

It may only be a single victory on a track dissimilar to any of the 10 in the Chase for the Sprint Cup playoffs, but in the big picture it demonstrated again why Harvick and his Chevrolet-backed team shouldn’t be overlooked.

On the year, he’s amassed more top-10 finishes than any of the Toyota five and only trails Kyle Busch’s series-leading 11 top-five finishes by one. And though point totals can be skewed due to the varying agendas teams have during the regular season once a Chase berth is secured, Harvick leads in that category, too.

“Performance hasn’t really been an issue,” Harvick said. “Yeah, there’s been a couple race tracks where they beat us, but I don’t think I could count more than three races that I thought that we wouldn’t have been in contention to win.”

Harvick’s weakness in 2016, and really for the entirety of his stint with SHR, involves mistakes continually limiting the frequency with which he’s visited victory lane. He led 100 or more laps six times, yet only twice could he convert those leads into wins (Bristol, Phoenix).

This is why Harvick doesn’t see Toyota as holding the upper hand with the dawn of the Chase just four weeks out. He ultimately views it as his team dictating its own championship fortunes -- that the No. 4 SHR team is every bit as good as JGR and FRR, and if the self-inflicted mistakes can be curbed then a second championship in three years is a realistic possibility.

“It’s really not a competition between us and Toyota,” Harvick said. “Really for us it’s about not beating ourselves.

“We should have won a lot of races this year, but we just had things not go our way. We made mistakes, or whatever the case may be.”

Two years ago, Harvick was better than everyone in winning his first Sprint Cup trophy. Last year, the Toyotas regrouped after a lackluster 2014 and Busch beat Harvick straight up for the title in the championship round.

A repeat battle between the two parties certainly seems at hand come the playoffs.

“It’s us against us,” Harvick said. “That’s how we’re going to treat it, and if that’s not good enough, then we’ll go back to the drawing board next year. I think we have a good plan.”